Census: More single dads heading lone-parent families

Single-Dad

OTTAWA — When Trevor Tuckwell and his son Taryn are out in public, few people realize that the Victoria, B.C., father has full custody of his 11-year-old son.

“People generally assume I have him for the weekend,” Tuckwell said. “When people find out (I’m a single father), they’re always surprised.”

Yet, they shouldn’t be. The latest census data, released Wednesday morning, confirmed what was first seen in the last census: men are slowly closing the gender gap in lone-parent families, with the rate of single fathers increasing at more than two-and-a-half times the rate of single mothers between 2006 and 2011.

The latest figures from Statistics Canada continue a decade-long shift in the makeup of lone-parent families, with single fathers now numbering more than 305,000 nationwide, up from the 280,000 recorded in the 2006 census. The 16.2-per-cent increase in the number of single fathers outpaced the 14-per-cent growth between 2001 and 2006, a figure that at the time experts suggested was partially a result of the courts granting more fathers full custody of their children.

But there are few resources for the growing brood of single fathers, Tuckwell said. Where resources exist, few take advantage of the supports.

“There are lots of single dads out there,” said Tuckwell, who helps run a single father support group. “I’m not really seeing a change in our number of dads coming through the doors.”

The number of single mothers has not faded, though. They head up about eight in 10 lone-parent families: more than 1.2 million women were single parents in Canada in 2011, according to the census data. Their numbers grew at a rate of six per cent, the same pace recorded between 2001 and 2006.

Single parents were most likely to be between 40 and 49 years old and have one child. But an increasing number of children under the age of 14 — about one in five across the country — live with a single parent.

In 2011, there were more than 1.5 million lone-parent families in Canada, up from the more than 1.4 million recorded in 2006.

The last time the country saw such a high number of single parents was in the early part of the 20th century, in 1921, when high mortality rates left one-tenth of the population without one of their parents. In 1941, single-parent families represented 12.2 per cent of the population. Near the height of the Baby Boom generation in 1961, their share of the population was 8.4 per cent — a figure that wasn’t surpassed until 1986.

In 2011, lone-parent families represented 16.3 per cent of all families in Canada, an increase of 0.6 per cent over the past 10 years, but almost double the number in 1961.

“Lone-parent families in the 1920s and 1930s we were observing for a very different reason (than today),” said Statistics Canada senior demographer Laurent Martel. “Now, lone-parent families have been created in recent years through divorce rather than widowhood.”

Scroll through our map of Canadian cities to see how many single dads are in each:

How well they do financially is not entirely clear. The census didn’t track their earnings; that data will come out next year with the findings from the National Household Survey.

Toni Boss, a single mother from Calgary, said she has to watch every penny to cover her bills for her and her son Marcus, 2.

“The bills don’t change,” she said. “We are all struggling with the same thing.”

Studies have suggested that the financial condition for single mothers has improved over time as they age and increase their earning potential.

“That being said, still a lot of them were below the poverty line,” said Celine Le Bourdais, the Canada Research Chair in Social Statistics and Family Change from McGill University.

These children may also benefit from having the other parent still in their lives, either through financial support, which helps the lone-parent household, or emotional support to the child, Le Bourdais said.

The census data don’t suggest how many of the children live part-time with the other parent.

Le Bourdais said the key for policy planners is to come up with programs that help single parents who have unique economic and social needs, whether they’re single for a few months or few years.

“You need to keep support (flowing),” Le Bourdais said. “For a lot of them, it won’t be that long a period in their life.”

When Boss landed a full-time job paying $40,000 annually, she lost out on subsidies to send Marcus to recreational activities. Tuckwell said he once almost rejected a raise of 50 cents per hour because it would lose Taryn’s after-school program subsidy, which would have cost Tuckwell an extra $300 a month.

“That’s part of the problem. We want single parents to be successful, but then we add in these supports … that force you to be low income,” Tuckwell said.

The ratio of single parents was highest in the North, where they head up nearly one-third of Nunavut’s families. For the provinces, the percentage of single parents ranged from a low of 14.5 per cent in Alberta to a high of 17.3 per cent in Nova Scotia.

Windsor, Ont., had the highest ratio of single-parent families than any other metropolitan area in the 2011 census, with nearly 20 per cent of all families in the border city being single mothers and fathers.

When looking at all census subdivisions — all those municipalities with a population of 5,000 or more — Yarmouth, N.S., bumped Prince Albert, Sask., as the city with the highest percentage of single-parent families.

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